John Updike

It was strange and sad to leave my lit classroom a week ago, after having just taught the much-anthologized story "A&P", and hear on NPR that writing great John Updike had died at age 76. His career was varied and admirable, and he seems to me an example of getting in there and getting the job done.

Here are two remarks from Updike included in some NPR profiles that I found here that resonate:

Writing about "ordinary life," Updike says, is a big problem for fiction writers; everyday lives do not involve heroism or extraordinary crises. But the way in which we are alive is meaningful," Updike says, "and it does have a certain radiance — the beauty of the actual. That's what I keep pushing at."

AND

"Throughout his career, the author never seemed to lose sight of the power of words. In a 2005 "This I Believe" essay he wrote: 'I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.'"